Assume Nothing about Edward Epstein

[Anthony Thorne]

Garwin was a regular member of the JASON group and began a second term on the President's Science Advisory Committee the same same year that Nixon took office. Garwin was something of a maverick, between a moderate Republican and a hawk, and he helped advise the Pentagon and CIA on all sorts of technical issues during the Vietnam war. He pops up in Sarah Bridger's SCIENTISTS AT WAR: THE ETHICS OF COLD WAR WEAPONS RESEARCH, and luckily for everyone who doesn't want to pay $100 for the hardcover of that book, Bridger seems to have made a PDF of that volume available for free. The link isn't pasting for me so I've linked the file from online below. Garwin gave advice on the nuclear topic just near the end of the Johnson era, and there was a public fuss made, along with some antagonistic newspaper articles, when he went over to Vietnam to give advice in person on the topic. Bridger's book indicates he largely warned the administration off using them.

The JASON group Garwin frequently worked with typically gave advice to Pentagon and intelligence officials - (I always liked their name, as it reportedly stems from the half year the members often met, through July August September October November). Garwin would later serve as an advisor to a hawkish group at Harvard that featured names like James Woolsey and Judith Miller, and in the late 90's he sat among hawks and right wingers (including Wolfowitz and Woolsey again) on Rumsfeld's Ballistic Missile Commission. Garwin later noted that he'd simply done his best to talk sense to the others, but I wonder. There's a C-Span clip from years earlier at some government setting where the camera cuts away from whomever to Rumsfeld laughing, with Garwin laughing right alongside him. Generally Garwin and the JASON's were around to solve tricky problems, help the government and military out of tight technical spots, and occasionally produce reports that the hawks found useful, when some regular academics and scientists were turning up their nose at working on reports that might help the war. Scientists who said yes to the military contracts were gradually dragged away from their peers, and encouraged in various ways by the military to write more of them - a lucrative racket for some of them, apparently.

Garwin is still around at 95 and still has his IBM email address, and I should possibly email him a hello sometime to see if he has any comments on anything.

 

 

Sarah Bridger - Scientists and the Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research.pdf

[David Andrews]

Garwin was well known at the Time magazine level in the Nixon years, enough so that a woman on a commercial flight with him stood up and denounced him as a war criminal.  I can find the reference for that, if needed.

Edited April 20, 2023 by David Andrews

[James DiEugenio]

I thought the JASON Group was run by  Alvarez.

[Anthony Thorne]

The longest useful page on the JASON's for our purposes is probably Joel van der Reijden's, here - 

https://isgp-studies.com/jason-group-national-security-science

His Garwin summary is

Quote

Co-founder of the NRO. Director of Science and Technology of the CFR. Served on the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) and chaired its panels on Military Aircraft, Anti-submarine and Naval Warfare. Informed Henry Kissinger on certain science topics. Expert in electromagnetic weaponry, but admitted he didn't have access to all the of the compartmented programs that are going on. Member of the National Academy of Sciences' 1982 Committee on Ballistic Acoustics that did its best to dispute the HSCA's conclusions of an over 95% probability of a grassy knoll shooter at the time of the Kennedy assassination.

As he notes, the JASON's have been operating under the wing of a parent company, MITRE, since the late 70's. MITRE came up a lot in the research I did a year and a half ago, as there were so many familiar names sitting on its board, Woolsey, James Schlesinger and others.

Back to the late 60's / early 70's though - all the various science names you'll find in the JASON's and in various academies, science groups, military boards and so on are heavily interlinked, almost as much as the neocons are. They all know each other, work with each other, and shift from various groups, get together on newly assembled commissions, ask each other questions, write to each other during projects for additional support, recommend one another to various government bodies for new jobs, new work, new positions. Garwin in this light is no different than Frederick Seitz, Joshua Lederberg, Sidney Drell and a handful of other names that pop up again and again in the CIA Crest database, and in standard official histories and documentation, as working continuously for various Pentagon and military concerns. Note - eventual CIA head John Deutch, and eventual Sec Def Ashton Carter (who worked together frequently) had background careers as scientists, and were gradually dragged into the Pentagon bureaucracy through their work with the Defense Science Board, of which Garwin was a member.

I didn't have time to get to the bottom of it but there was a new initiative by the CIA to recruit key scientists for various projects just before JFK was killed. Specifically, there are CIA Crest documents with letters, reports, correspondence, memos and even a few pages of a transcribed phone conversation in early November 1963 where the CIA was  wooing various scientific big names for a few projects that were specified, and a few that were unspecified. I ultimately decided the timing was probably coincidental as the CIA Crest site goes deep into many years, many dates, and the CIA are always doing whatever they're doing, but if determined you could ponder if the CIA did a big advisor push at that time because they knew the war effort was about to shift dramatically over the coming months after JFK was killed. There's a funny three or four page conversation (which nearly reads like dialogue from a spy movie with a guy in a phone booth in the rain making a private call) where a CIA figure talks about how great it will be if ******** can join their work, it will be so great to have you working for us. The name was redacted but based on various timelines I'm pretty certain it was Sidney Drell, himself a JASON figure who later worked on a few things with McGeorge Bundy.

Seitz and a few others, amid their work for the Defense Science Board, were pulled into positions in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), and ACDA was a major gathering point for numerous neocons and hawk advisors like Wolfowitz, Fred Ikle and others. Seitz notes in his biography that through the late 60's and early 70's ACDA experienced a 'rightward push' with both government and science folk of a rightwing, hawkish nature flocking together to work there, but leaves it at that. If you follow the membership of ACDA, you see numerous names becoming prominent in both neocon circles and the eventual Committee on the Present Danger, so this was the sort of crowd Garwin would have eventually been bumping up against, whether he wanted to or not. Garwin noted in a recent interview that he was a committed Republican voter right until Trump, which he viewed as a step too far. Interesting guy.

 

 

Edited April 21, 2023 by Anthony Thorne